Paperbacks from Hell: The Twisted History of '70s and '80s Horror Fiction

by Grady Hendrix

Amityville’s cottage-industry success stems from the fact that George Lutz stuck to his guns all his life, dishing out movie-ready claptrap from one side of his mouth while claiming it was all true from the other. Reportedly never happy with his share of the proceeds from the original best-selling book and movie, Lutz realized that he could still market his name. And so he did, desperately hoping to pad his bank account with sequel after sequel. After sequel.

Many people found the original story of demonic possession, goo flowing down walls, and mysterious voices shouting at priests hard to swallow. Those events pale in comparison to the sequels, with their devil pigs riding on the wings of 747s, attacks by fire bats, and evil forces compelling people to rent cars they don’t even want.

but in the third installment the story went from a simple meal of possessed homes to an all-you-can-eat buffet of occult bullshit. Amityville: The Final Chapter (1985) follows the Lutzes as they ditch their kids and fly around the world on a studio-paid publicity tour, giving interviews to promote the movie. Keeping the franchise going, the Entity (the source of all evil from the first book) goes mobile, following the family everywhere.

It’s an inspirational story. “One day,” author Ken Eulo said in an interview, “I read The Amityville Horror and I thought to myself, oh Christ, I could do this in my sleep.” And so he wrote The Brownstone (1980), which spawned two sequels.

Even poor deceased Jay Anson, a jobbing writer brought on board to write the original Amityville book, wasn’t allowed to rest in peace. His 666 (1981), effectively a smudged photocopy of The Amityville Horror, was published under his name a year after he died.

A 2013 documentary (My Amityville Horror) about Daniel Lutz, who was ten years old when his family moved in, puts a name to the Entity that haunted this house: George Lutz. George was Kathy Connors’s second husband, and he made it clear he would not invest his time and money in children who didn’t belong to him. George demanded that Kathy’s first husband surrender all parental rights; from then on, he insisted that Daniel and his two siblings call him either “sir” or “Mr. Lutz.” As Daniel said in the documentary, “He’s the biggest asshole you ever could meet.”

Throughout the books, George and Kathy Lutz claim that the Entity changed their personalities and made them violently aggressive toward their children. But Daniel says that happened plenty of times before they moved in and plenty of times after they moved out. In fact, what happened after they fled was worse. While George and Kathy went on their year-long, round-the-world publicity tour for the movie, Daniel was ditched at a Catholic boarding school, where he claims the priests beat him and tried to exorcize his demons. He was eleven.

You are in a William W. Johnstone novel. Johnstone wrote two hundred books, most of them Westerns and men’s adventure stories. But with his five-part Devil series (1980–92) written for Zebra Books (The Devil’s Kiss, The Devil’s Heart, The Devil’s Touch, The Devil’s Cat, The Devil’s Laughter), Johnstone became a horror novelist. And every one of his horror novels is insane.

The cops have been bought off by Satan and are given to ending conversations with statements like, “I’d lick her ass just to see the little puckered hole. Bye, now.”

Toy Cemetery (1987) achieves maximum Johnstone. Vietnam vet Jay Clute returns to Victory, Missouri, where he grew up, with nine-year-old daughter Kelly in tow. Within hours of his arrival, Jay discovers that the two major local landmarks are (1) an enormous doll factory in the center of town run by an obese pedophile named Bruno Dixon, who films satanic kiddie porn in it, and (2) a high-security hospital/mental institution/underground research facility that houses the “products of incest,” enormous man-monsters with apple-sized heads and superhuman strength.

Reading this book is like driving through a dust storm while in a post-concussion haze: the harder you try to focus, the more everything slips away into an insanity vortex. A supermarket check-out girl’s head explodes, but no one seems to mind. Possessed teenage boys follow Kelly through town, waggling their inappropriate boners until she fights them with karate and kills one with an ax.

Between 1970 and 1980, one million white people left New York City, and in the first four years of the ’70s, six million Americans ditched the cities for the country. It was the first decade in 150 years that the rural population grew faster than the urban population.

In a stroke of poor planning, apparently the majority of America’s rural communities had been built on cursed land. Whether it’s the site of an ancient murder (The Owlsfane Horror, 1981), a witch hanging (Maynard’s House, 1980), or a Native American massacre (The Curse, 1989), America feels like a massive graveyard stretching from sea to shining sea.

Add in parts of the country rendered unfit for human habitation by invisible aliens who return every few hundred years to kill people with spontaneous orgasms that melt their brains (The Searing, 1980), sinister cults occupying abandoned mental hospitals (The Turning, 1978), or isolated beachheads where Satan is growing killer humanoids in church basements (Effigies, 1980), and you might as well stay in the city and get murdered by the sewer alligators. (Keep reading.)

Not content to rest on the laurels of The Other, Thomas Tryon wrote another classic, Harvest Home (1973), all about the dangers of romanticizing small-town life.

Tryon had watched his colleagues abandon the city for the country, lecturing those they left behind about the clean air and good values of their new neighbors. The ex-urbanites buy failing farms at rock-bottom prices and then fetishize what they’ve destroyed, scooping up farm tools at bankruptcy sales and nailing them to the walls of their brand-new kitchens. Tryon wondered if their new neighbors might not share the same values as these newcomers, if perhaps they were aligned with stronger, older, bloodier forces that the city folk had forgotten.

Tryon, and the writers who followed in his footsteps, suggested that urban refugees patronized the flyover states at their peril. Joan Samson’s The Auctioneer is a hard and flinty book about a small farming community decimated by the city dwellers who move in and start buying up all the wagon wheels and handmade quilts, then the town’s small children, and finally its soul.

Jere Cunningham sums up small-town trauma in The Abyss (1984), his apocalyptic novel set in Tennessee coal country. The town of Bethel has shrunk to a dying cluster of cheap bars and trailer parks since all the old mines closed. But now investors are bringing in deep-drilling equipment to reopen an old shaft. Suddenly there are jobs, people are moving back, and the dream of manufacturing’s return is alive again. A few ominous signs appear, but if you’re loyal to Bethel, if you’re the kind of person who belongs there, if you believe in America, then you’re not about to question a good thing. It turns out the shaft was shut down because the miners had accidentally drilled into hell,

A 1968 sanitation strike left 48,000 tons of garbage rotting in the streets. Murder rates skyrocketed (the city’s annual homicides reached an all-time high of 2,245 by 1990; these days they total around 352). Between 1965 and 1975, auto thefts doubled, rapes tripled, robberies increased tenfold. Hell wasn’t the small town. It was the big city.

As the middle class fled, the tax base collapsed; by the mid-’70s, the Big Apple was within days of defaulting on a $150 million debt. So many city employees were laid off that twenty-six fire companies disbanded. Fifty firehouses were shuttered and the city went up in flames: in 1970, over 120,000 fires broke out, and arson investigations hit 13,000 per year.

A simple-minded mystic bites off young boys’ penises in Spanish Harlem (Rooftops, 1981) while alligators roam the sewers (Death Tour, 1978). The real-life blackout of 1977 provides cover for half-human throwbacks to rampage up from the sewers in T. E. D. Klein’s novella “Children of the Kingdom,” and secret societies worship the subway-tunnel-dwelling Head Underneath in John Shirley’s Cellars (1982).

In Our Lady of Darkness (1977), Fritz Leiber offers his theory of Megapolisomancy, a “new science of cities” formulated by his fictitious magician Thibaut de Castries. The streets and subway tunnels, water mains and gas pipes, steam tunnels and power cables formed lines of power that imbued cities with dark magic.

As the book ends, one of the officers keeps an eye on crime stats. As long as they keep going down, people are safe. But if they start going up again, it means the city is stirring back to life. Only gentrification can keep the forces of darkness at bay.

Ramsey Campbell will show you terror in a plastic bag. Or a pedestrian underpass. Or a deserted council estate. Since the late ’70s, he has written dozens of novels and hundreds of short stories, from erotic horror to the traditional ghost story. But in the ’80s, he was the chief practitioner of Fritz Leiber’s style of urban horror, luring readers into empty city streets and squalid basements and confronting them with the monsters that were born there.

Campbell writes the way schizophrenics think (he’s said that for most of his life, his mother showed signs of schizophrenia). He doesn’t want to describe actions; he wants to alter perceptions.

If there’s one thing horror novels from the ’70s and ’80s can teach us, it’s that doctors in hospitals are mostly interested in impregnating patients with Swedish clones (Embryo), decapitating patients and using their heads to form a living computer (Heads, 1985), or harvesting putrid snot from the multiple anuses of alien worms with an insatiable appetite for human flesh (Fatal Beauty, 1990).

An ophthalmologist as well as an author, Cook has checked eyes and written best sellers with equal frequency. He’s best known for Coma (1977), the source of the medical-thriller Nile. Written in 1977, the book spent thirteen weeks on the New York Times Best-Seller List and spawned a hit movie directed by Michael Crichton.

There are also a lot of lectures on medicine and ethics delivered with the plodding rhythms of a man unaccustomed to interruption, a failing Cook shares with Crichton, that other M.D.-turned-author.

Take, for example, the toxic effects of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs): boring when you read about them in academic studies on drinking water, but exciting when they achieve sentience, dissolve the skin off a trucker, and make him smash his hurtling rig into a speeding train (Slime).